Okay, who just broke Miami?

Over the past year or so I’ve constantly heard people saying that the transportation problems in Miami are the worst they’ve ever seen… Day after day, as it keeps progressively getting worse.

Well, I’ve never seen it this bad either.

The Venetian Causeway is gone. The MacArthur and Julia Tuttle causeways have nightly reductions to one lane. I-95 is probably closed more than it’s open now. The Palmetto Expressway has dangerous lane shifts causing constant accidents as it is hacked and slashed to bits to turn it into a corridor of Lexus lanes and fail.

The alternative is kind of failing royally though. Today, I was treated to the sight of Tri-Rail sailing away seven minutes early yet again after being delayed for about ten by a Hollywood public works crew closing an entire four lane road to painstakingly remove small pieces of litter from the wide median.

At that point I checked Waze, it’d be 1 hour 25 minutes to drive to work or about 1 hour to catch Metrorail directly. Upon arrival there, I found the system stalled due to a broken down train.

Not shown here: the cherry red glowing dynamic brake grid on the fourth car that I just couldn't get a photo of.

Green City is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of. The plan is to use this big plot of land currently occupied by seasonal farms and a weird old deep well injection / aquifer storage and recovery (ASR, also known as Complete and Utter Bullshit) site. The development proposals call for this to be a transit oriented development.

Only problem is……. there’s no transit.

The nearest transit is a couple of bus routes that run every 30 minutes during daylight hours and then cut off. WEEKDAY ONLY. The very southernmost part of it is somewhat near-ish to a park and ride and transit hub south of Kendall Drive, but not within walking distance as that thing’s set WAAAY back in the middle of nowhere.

I recall a few years back reading about how there were certain guidelines for transit oriented development; you were not qualified for certain funding and other benefits unless the transit line was already in place and offered 24 hour service with a reasonable service frequency. I can’t find those rules again today. Are those still in place? Or, is the developer simply not actually counting on this thing actually being qualified as transit oriented development and just slapping that buzzword on it in hopes of getting a foot in the door towards pushing the Urban Development Boundary more easily?

I don’t know. All I know is, well, fuck this and the Cadillac Escalade it rolled in on.